The average stress of people in China’s workplace is reaching the peak in recent two years. To improve employee’s positive psychological factors, Spiritual leadership has a good performance in this regard. Based on the mediating effect of goal self-concordance and self-efficacy, this paper further studies the impact of spiritual leadership on employee’s work engagement. Through the empirical study, the following conclusions are drawn: (1) Spiritual leadership significantly positively affects the employee’s work engagement. (2) Spiritual leadership has a significant positive effect on goal self-concordance and self-efficacy. (3) Goal self-concordance and self-efficacy have significant positive effects on employee’s work engagement. (4) Goal self-concordance and self-efficacy play a partial mediating role in the process of spiritual leadership’s impact on employees’ work engagement. This study found the new mediator which partly revealed the mechanism between the effectiveness of Spiritual Leadership and employee’s work engagement. This study may serve as one of the researches for improving the effectiveness of leaders in organizations and promoting the motivation of employees in the workplace.
In 2020, the COVID epidemic swept the world, which brought multidimensional negative impacts and challenges throughout the industry, enterprises and job market. The
Work engagement is recently popularized as a positive psychological factor. Kahn [
Since spiritual leadership acts as the condensers of organizational spiritual strength, focusing on improving employees’ positive psychological factors, work performance and well-being, and promoting their self-realization, also work engagement as an positive psychological factor that plays an important role referring to work performance, this study hopefully would reveal the mechanism of the positively impact of spiritual leadership on employees’ work engagement, especially in the post epidemic era.
Existing studies reveal that spiritual leadership has a significant positive impact on work engagement and psychological capital and affirm the positive regulatory role of self-monitoring [
Are there some factors which play potential impacts in this work mechanism? From the observation of practical work environment and the references we found that employees who are now inclined to rethink the meaning of life and work with the development of society and the impact of the epidemic. They tend to perceive work as a journey to pursuit value and obtain spiritual satisfaction rather than a repeated action to support families merely. In other words, whether a goal is meaningful and valuable in daily work determines employees’ mental health and well-being. The self-determination theory explains that the goal-pursuit, which reflects individual interests and internal values and beliefs and meets the primary psychological demand of individuals, does help to improve their sense of happiness [
Therefore, we can assume that the positive behaviors of improving employees’ goal-self concordance, stimulating their sense of self-efficacy and promoting work engagement are crucial to gain happiness and ensure mental health. In this regard, the objective of this study involves: whether spiritual leadership gives rise to individual positive characteristics (goal-self concordance and self-efficacy); whether goal-self concordance and self-efficacy promote work engagement; and what is the impact of these two individual characteristics on the relationship between spiritual leadership and work engagement.
Spiritual leadership is considered a cutting-edge theme in the field of leadership research in the international academic community. Under the background of giving challenges, Spiritual leadership is generally perceived as the cohesion of organizational spiritual strength in such a challenging era; its main task lies in encouraging employees to thoroughly realize themselves and enhance the exchange relationship between leaders and members, to enhance the competitiveness of the organization.
The research on spiritual leadership was first proposed under the background of American religious culture. Therefore, the definition of spiritual leadership is set based on the relationship between spirituality and religious belief. Fry [
Some academic breakthroughs have been made in spiritual leadership concerning its depth, breadth, and innovativeness in recent years. Shi and coworkers [
The goal-self concordance model is originated from the goal-setting theory and self-determination theory, which explains that the degree of concordance between goal and self reflects the level of one’s motivation. Deci et al. [
Early studies on goal-self concordance focus on the process and results of individual pursuit of goals; it was also assumed that goals reflect individual value beliefs, which verified that the individual pursuit of goals had a positive effect on survival and development of humans [
According to the updated self-determination theory, the research on goal-self concordance is conducted based on individuals’ goal-setting and studies the motivational process and the conative processes of achieving goals that individuals actively generate. In this process, controlled causes and autonomous causes may affect the behavior of pursuing goals. There are three general explanations for goal-pursuit: the goal is exciting and pleasant; the goal is essential to individuals; the goal represents individual values. While the controlled cause is to avoid shame or guilt by pursuing goals. Therefore, Koestner et al. [
Based on the self-determination theory, Wang [
Bandura [
Sherer et al. [
In China, Lu et al. [
The application of self-efficacy is expanding from the field of pedagogy to organizational management. Yue et al. [
Work engagement reflects the positive characteristics of individuals, which have been greatly influenced by the positive psychology advocated by the academic community in recent years. Positive psychology is proposed to help people, from the perspective of practical, constructive forces involving people’s virtue and function, to obtain the necessary elements of happiness, so it stresses the positive forces of individuals.
Kahn [
Li et al. [
Fry [
First, from the perspective of vision, clear goals promote individuals to form a positive attitude and intrinsic motivation. Spiritual leadership may construct a clear and comprehensible vision; it conveys positive work concepts to employees via words and demands consistent with the organizational vision, thereby promoting employees’ work engagement by providing organization members with a sense of mission and existence.
Secondly, concerning faith, spiritual leaders are confident in themselves, organizations and employees, which provides employees with working motivations through reasonable incentives.
Third, from the perspective of altruistic love, the selfless care and spiritual care of leaders for employees meet the psychological needs of the latter, which provides employees a sense of respect and trust and promotes employee’s work engagement.
More and more research has been done on the relationship between spiritual leadership and employees’ work-related behavior in recent years. Deng [
The following hypothesis is proposed based on the cases mentioned above:
H1: spiritual leadership has a positive impact on employees’ work engagement.
Goal-self concordance is considered a part of self-integration, which originates from the needs of one’s internal interest and self-identity. In setting goals and pursuing goals, the initiative of personal growth and integration means a lot. Highly consistent goal-self concordance may predict positive attitudes and behaviors. Therefore, internal motivation is essential for achieving goal-self concordance.
Liu et al. discussed the impact of transformational college leadership on teachers’ organizational commitment in combination with the current situation of college education, and verified the intermediary role of goal-self concordance and self-efficacy. The results reveal that the transformational is beneficial in promoting employees to achieve goal-self concordance [
Base on the researches of the goal-self concordance model, Sheldon et al. [
The following hypotheses are proposed based on the cases mentioned above:
H2: spiritual leadership has a positive impact on goal-self concordance.
H3: goal-self concordance has a positive impact on employees’ work engagement.
H4: goal-self concordance plays an intermediary role between spiritual leadership and employees’ work engagement.
In recent years, researches on and self-efficacy have been deepening, and the theory of self-efficacy has been widely used in education, medical treatment, human resources, etc. Self-efficacy refers to one’s subjective attitude towards whether he or she can complete a thing, which can be essentially summarized as: one’s confidence in finishing a task by their behavior. Besides, self-efficacy is considered a key factor to stimulate people’s motivation and behavior by perceiving the external environment.
Jiang et al. [
Sense of self-efficacy serves as one of the main factors affecting work engagement. With the increasing pressure confronting the development of enterprise, employees are becoming the core potential of the enterprise, leading to that individual factor that may significantly affect employees’ work engagement. Individual factors refer to employees’ perception and motivation, then their perception of ability may significantly affect work engagement [
The following hypotheses are proposed based on the cases mentioned above:
H5: spiritual leadership positively affects self-efficacy.
H6: self-efficacy positively affects employees’ work engagement.
H7: self-efficacy intermediates the relationship between spiritual leadership and employees’ work engagement.
As mentioned above, the self-concordant goal originates from autonomous motivation and personal choice and recognition. When people pursue goals accords with internal values or interests, they tend to acquire a high degree of goal-self concordance. Employees may also gain more sense of well-being when achieving goal-self concordance, to improve work engagement. While spiritual leaders can provide more care and encouragement to employees in daily work to meet their spiritual demands. When the leaders convey the mission and vision to employees, the latter may obtain a sense of belonging and achievement based on organizational members’ identity, promote the formation of positive psychological values, stimulate autonomous motivation, and then affect employees’ work engagement.
Meanwhile, spiritual leadership can improve the external environment perceived by employees, which provides the latter with more positive hints to improve self-efficacy. As told in previous literature, self-efficacy positively mediates the impact of positive leadership on employees’ behavior. Therefore, it is hereby assumed that self-efficacy assists employees in achieving their work targets and improve work engagement.
The theoretical model is hereby established as
The formal investigation was conducted from February 20, 2021 to March 26, 2021. To ensure the preciseness, universality and authenticity of the data, online questionnaires were collected from employees in 12 China’s major cities including Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Zhengzhou, etc., via students, teachers, relatives and other channels, covering fields of finance, hospitals, real estate, colleges. A total of 300 questionnaires are collected in this survey, of which 212 are valid (excluding the questionnaires with obvious overlapped same options), the overall effective rate reached 70.67%. The sample of this survey is illustrated in
Individual employee characteristics | Frequency | Percentage (%) | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Nature of industry | Manufacture | 47 | 22.2 | |
Technology | 58 | 27.4 | ||
Research and development | 41 | 19.3 | ||
The others | 66 | 31.1 | ||
Level of education | High school or below | 32 | 15.1 | |
Associate degree | 68 | 32.1 | ||
Bachelor degree | 82 | 38.7 | ||
Master degree or above | 30 | 14.2 | ||
Year of birth | 1969 and before | 13 | 6.1 | |
1970–1979 | 34 | 16.0 | ||
1980–1989 | 70 | 33.0 | ||
1990 and beyond | 95 | 44.8 | ||
Working seniority | Less Than 1 Year | 30 | 14.2 | |
1–2 Year | 25 | 11.8 | ||
2–5 Year | 60 | 28.3 | ||
5–10 Year | 74 | 34.9 | ||
Over 10 Years | 23 | 10.8 | ||
Position | Ordinary member | 102 | 48.1 | |
The mainstay of scientific research and technology | 75 | 35.4 | ||
Team leader | 35 | 16.5 | ||
Gender | Male | 108 | 50.9 | |
Female | 104 | 49.1 |
Note: N = 212.
Most of the scales adopted in this paper have been extensively applied and verified in the corresponding fields to ensure preciseness, which presents high reliability and validity. The 5-point scoring method was adopted in this paper: 1 refers to “completely inconsistent,” 2 refers to “relatively consistent,” 3 refers to “generally consistent,” 4 refers to “inconsistent,” and 5 refers to “fully consistent.”
The spiritual leadership scale adopts the three-dimensional scale developed by Fry [
SPSS22.0 software is applied in this study to analyze the reliability of each variable, and the Alpha coefficient is introduced to test the reliability of each scale. When Alpha is greater than 0.7, it indicates that the internal consistency level of the questionnaire is relatively credible. Based on this standard, the Alpha coefficients of the four scales in this study are all measured above 0.8, which indicates a high internal consistency and reliability of the scales in this paper. The data is illustrated in
Variable | Number of items | Cronbach Alpha value |
---|---|---|
Goal-self concordance | 12 | 0.833 |
Spiritual leadership | 14 | 0.878 |
Employees’ work engagement | 9 | 0.822 |
Self-efficacy | 10 | 0.840 |
Spss22.0 software is applied to analyze the aggregate validity of four variables, including spiritual leadership, sense of self-efficacy, self-efficacy and employee’s work engagement. Previous studies show that data is available for factor analysis when the KMO value is no less than 0.7. Meanwhile, a significant result of Bartlett’s spherical test indicates that there are common factors among the sample items. As shown in
Variables | KMO value | Approximate χ2 value | df | Significance |
---|---|---|---|---|
Spiritual leadership | 0.916 | 878.755 | 91 | 0.000 |
Goal-self concordance | 0.880 | 597.925 | 66 | 0.000 |
Self-efficacy | 0.887 | 551.734 | 45 | 0.000 |
Employee’s work engagement | 0.880 | 453.890 | 36 | 0.000 |
Concerning the dimensional distinction between spiritual leadership and work engagement scale, AMOS22.0 is hereby introduced in this paper to conduct confirmatory factor analysis to test the internal structural validity of the two scales. As illustrated in
Variables | χ2/df | RMSEA | CFI | IFI | TLI |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Spiritual leadership | 1.288 | 0.032 | 0.973 | 0.974 | 0.962 |
Employee’s work engagement | 1.249 | 0.030 | 0.986 | 0.986 | 0.973 |
Basis for evaluation | <3.000 | <0.08 | >0.900 | >0.900 | >0.900 |
Note: χ2/df refers to the ratio of Chi-square value to degrees of freedom, RMSEA refers to the mean square root of the approximation error, CFI refers to the comparative fit index, IFI refers to the incremental fit index, and TLI refers to the Tucker-Lewis index in the comparative fit index.
AMOS22.0 software is used to conduct confirmatory factor analysis on the whole questionnaire to test the discriminant validity further, as illustrated in
Models | χ2/df | RMSEA | CFI | IFI | TLI |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Four factor model: SL; GS; SE; WE | 1.324 | 0.034 | 0.955 | 0.956 | 0.947 |
Three-factor model: SL+GS; SE; WE | 1.344 | 0.035 | 0.952 | 0.953 | 0.944 |
Double factor model: SL+GS+SE; WE | 2.341 | 0.137 | 0.847 | 0.852 | 0.832 |
Single factor model: SL+GS+SE+WE | 3.345 | 0.149 | 0.751 | 0.731 | 0.697 |
Note: SL refers to spiritual leadership, GS refers to goal-self concordance, SE refers to the sense of self-efficacy, WE refer to work engagement.
Multiple collinearity analysis is preferentially considered in this study. The author judges whether there is collinearity problem between variables via two indicators: variance expansion factor and tolerance. The results indicate that VIF of the two indicators is less than 4, tolerance is greater than 0.1, no serious collinearity problem is detected.
Then, the mean value, standard deviation and correlation coefficient of the research variables are calculated and analyzed by SPSS22.0. Hypotheses H1, H2 and H5 are hereby verified. As shown in
Variables | Mean | S.D. | Spiritual leadership | Goal-self concordance | Self-efficacy | Employee’s work engagement |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Spiritual leadership | 3.5280 | 0.77835 | ||||
Goal-self concordance | 3.5550 | 0.73896 | 0.823** | |||
Self-efficacy | 3.5009 | 0.79423 | 0.839** | 0.802** | ||
Employee’s work engagement | 3.5241 | 0.81287 | 0.844** | 0.796** | 0.809** |
Note: *** indicates
The testing method proposed by Baron et al. [
Firstly, the relationship between independent and dependent variables is verified, which indicates that spiritual leadership has a significant positive impact on employees’ work engagement (β = 0.845,
Secondly, the relationship between independent and mediating variables is tested: spiritual leadership has a significant positive impact on goal-self concordance (β = 0.817,
Thirdly, when adding spiritual leadership and goal-self concordance into the same model, the impact of spiritual leadership on employees’ work engagement is weakened (M7: β = 0.576,
Finally, the variables of goal-self concordance and self-efficacy are introduced into the impact model of spiritual leadership on employees’ work engagement, to test the role of goal-self concordance and self-efficacy as intermediary variables in the impact path of spiritual leadership on employees’ work engagement. See
Variables | Goal-self concordance | Self-efficacy | Employee’s work engagement | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
M1 | M2 | M3 | M4 | M5 | M6 | M7 | M8 | M9 | |
Nature of industry | 0.069 | 0.036 | 0.095 | 0.061 | −0.037 | −0.071 | −0.083 | −0.094 | −0.097 |
Level of education | 0.031 | 0.027 | 0.024 | 0.019 | −0.054 | −0.058 | −0.067 | −0.065 | −0.070 |
Birth of year | −0.118 | −0.055 | −0.096 | −0.031 | −0.108 | −0.042 | −0.024 | −0.031 | −0.020 |
Working seniority | −0.007 | −0.006 | 0.009 | 0.010 | 0.059 | 0.060 | 0.062 | 0.057 | 0.059 |
Position | 0.065 | 0.056 | 0.099 | 0.089 | −0.052 | −0.061 | −0.079 | −0.094 | −0.100 |
Gender | 0.024 | 0.045 | 0.026 | 0.048 | 0.036 | 0.058 | 0.043 | 0.040 | 0.033 |
Spiritual leadership | 0.817*** | 0.833*** | 0.845*** | 0.576*** | 0.538*** | 0.413*** | |||
Goal-self concordance | 0.329*** | 0.239*** | |||||||
Self-efficacy | 0.369*** | 0.285*** | |||||||
R2 | 0.026 | 0.689 | 0.032 | 0.709 | 0.020 | 0.728 | 0.761 | 0.757 | 0.872 |
ΔR2 | 0.662 | 0.688 | 0.708 | 0.034 | 0.038 | 0.038 | |||
F | 0.930 | 64.624 | 1.115 | 74.619 | 0.701 | 77.920 | 81.013 | 83.049 | 80.371 |
Note: *** represents p < 0.001.
This paper studies the impact of spiritual leadership on employees’ work engagement, and explores the mediating role of goal-self concordance and self-efficacy in this influencing path. Following conclusions are make according to the empirical analysis of 212 questionnaire data: 1. Spiritual leadership significantly promotes employees’ work engagement; 2. Spiritual leadership significantly promotes goal-self concordance and self-efficacy; 3. Goal-self concordance and self-efficacy significantly promote employees’ work engagement; 4. Goal-self concordance and self-efficacy play a partial intermediary role in the impact path of spiritual leadership on employees’ work engagement.
Firstly, the author extends the research on the relationship between spiritual leadership and employees’ work engagement. Previous literature shows that there are various antecedent variables affecting employees’ work engagement, such as work characteristics, active personality, goal-self concordance, various leadership styles, and so on. This paper combines theory with practical research to better focus on the impact of spiritual leadership on employees’ work engagement, and enrich the research on the antecedent variables of work engagement.
Secondly, this study enriches the researches on the mediating factors between spiritual leadership and work engagement. Under the same impacts of spiritual leadership and upper guidance, goal-self concordance and self-efficacy are the intermediary variables in the path of spiritual leadership’s impact on employee’s work engagement. The self-concordant goal originates from independent motivation and the personal interest and value identification of the selected goal. While self-efficacy is defined as people’s subjective evaluation of their ability.
First, from the perspective of employees, this study may assist employees in adjusting their negative emotions in the work process, which meets their higher spiritual needs and realizes personal value. With the development of living conditions, employees desire to respect and realize their needs rather than be confused by low-level needs. Meanwhile, the spiritual leaders may create a long-term and stable value within the enterprise by extending their leadership status and qualification, which further affects the generation of employees’ self-concordant goals.
Second, from the perspective of the enterprises, the conclusion of this paper may be applied to optimize the leadership style from the manager level, improve the work engagement of employees, and contribute to the improvement of enterprise performance. Spiritual leadership positively guides employees in improving self-efficiency and generating self-concordant goals, while employees’ realization of goal-self concordance and improvement of self-efficacy also positively affects work engagement. The performance and market competitiveness of the enterprise will also be improved accordingly with the promotion of work engagement. Spiritual leadership motivates employees from various aspects, improves their loyalty, enhances their initiative to serve the organization and customers, and enhances the organization’s competitiveness.
As the new normal of development in the international economy, enterprises’ internal and external environment is constantly changing. Enterprises must realize the significance of spiritual leadership style in the workplace and pay more attention to the spiritual needs of employees if they intend to retain talents and promote employee’ work engagement in the fierce market competition. Firstly, managers should establish clear and reasonable goals to motivate subordinates based on the organization’s vision. Secondly, a positive image should be established to maintain the firm belief in the vision and development of the enterprise and guide the employees to promote work engagement with their persistence and enthusiasm. Finally, managers should timely provide employees spiritual support and care, thus promoting a sense of belonging and achievement and increasing employees’ sense of identity with the organization.
Leaders may pay more attention to improving employees’ self-efficacy and adopt various incentive methods for those with differed self-efficacy. Considering that self-efficacy positively affects the impact of spiritual leadership on employees’ work engagement, leaders may focus on guiding employees with low self-efficacy and provide them with spiritual encouragement and work support, and extend the function of spiritual leadership.
It is essential to create an excellent corporate culture and emphasize the value of employees, given that employees have increasingly become an indispensable part of the core competitiveness with the continuous progress of modern society. In the operation and management of the company, leaders may also care about the career growth of employees, which means establishing a sound communication mechanism to maintain long-term communication with employees and enhancing the relationship between superiors and subordinates.
Considering that most of the research samples are obtained based on the availability principle, the limited quantity of collected samples may lead to insufficient diversity of samples and biased survey coverage. Follow-up researches are required to expand the quantity and source range of samples to improve the diversity and representativeness of samples. Future studies may also expand the regional and industrial coverage of the sample, conduct detailed surveys for various types of employees, increase the sample capacity and avoid homologous data.
The questionnaires are filled in by the employees and leaders of the enterprise according to their subjective judgment. More methods for investigation are required in the future to make up for the lacking of objectivity. An in-depth review and specific case analysis may be adopted to improve the objectivity of the research and lay the foundation for the combination of theory and practice.
This paper found that the theory of goal-self concordance provides a meaningful path to approach positive motivation, as well as to understand complex humanistic concepts, such as “authenticity” and “real self.” It is worth exploring future research and practice to understand the profound meaning of goal-self concordance and continue to study the variables associated with goal-self concordance.
The authors would like to thank the Editor for his hard work in processing this article. Helpful comments from the anonymous reviewers are greatly appreciated.